Solid & sacred

Sunday

Jun 28, 2009 at 12:01 AMJun 28, 2009 at 12:50 PM

Willie Hunsaker, the retired caretaker of the Brigham City Tabernacle, describes its craftsmanship with pride.

He points out the pine pews, crafted to resemble oak ("That wood graining is a lost art"), the marble-look columns of red fir ("It feels like marble, doesn't it?"), and the massive woolen carpet crafted in Ireland because no local millers could produce the design.

Willie Hunsaker, the retired caretaker of the Brigham City Tabernacle, describes its craftsmanship with pride.

He points out the pine pews, crafted to resemble oak ("That wood graining is a lost art"), the marble-look columns of red fir ("It feels like marble, doesn't it?"), and the massive woolen carpet crafted in Ireland because no local millers could produce the design.

The building's equally impressive facade features an intricate play of textures, colors and shapes: walls of multicolored stone and red brick capped by a white-painted sheet-metal Gothic steeple and 16 delicate white fiberglass spires.

Located in northern Utah, the Brigham City Tabernacle typifies the exuberant eclecticism of Mormon sacred architecture.

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints marked the Western landscape with their faith and ingenuity. They constructed homes and businesses, as well as tabernacles for weekly worship services and temples devoted to their most sacred practices.

Mormonism was founded in upstate New York in 1830, when Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-44) published the Book of Mormon. The text detailed the wanderings of Israelites and, later, Jesus in the New World, giving American Indians a Middle Eastern ancestry and the United States a divine past.

The Mormons' own history is similarly a tale of pioneering and martyrdom. Persecuted as infidels, the believers kept fleeing: to Ohio, Missouri and then Illinois, where Smith (then a U.S. presidential candidate) and his brother, Hyrum, were murdered by an angry mob in 1844.

From Illinois, Brigham Young (1801-77), the second Mormon prophet, led the first migration to the Salt Lake Valley in 1846-47. The Mormons' cross-country pilgrimage -- by wagons, handcarts and, finally, rail -- continued through the 19th century.

Visitors can see highlights of the Mormons' architectural legacy on a driving trip through Nevada and Utah.

Early settlement

A bit north of the neon glories of the Las Vegas strip is a remnant of an old Mormon settlement, at Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort State Historic Park.

Thirty Mormon pioneers traveled there in June 1855 on orders from Brigham Young. By March 1857, the settlers were gone, chased away by dissension, steamy summers, restive Paiutes and the closing of their lead mine.

But park supervisor Chris Macek says it would be wrong to call the settlement a failure, because it led to the creation of Las Vegas. Despite the inhospitable climate, he says, the Mormons "proved you could live here."

The visitor center exhibit remarks on the tension between preservation and change. In truth, not much was preserved: Part of an adobe brick wall is the sole sign of the fort, incorporated into a building used in 1929 to test cement for Hoover Dam.

The ranch house that succeeded the fort is also gone. But the state has restored the original creek bed and reconstructed a portion of the fort, including a tower. With a handful of historic markers, a pioneer wagon, and an old exhibition gathering dust inside the dam building, the site has a forlorn air. But it comes to life during re-enactments, when descendants of the original settlers arrive in wagons to plant the flag of the Mormon state that was called Deseret.

Utah's Dixie

Situated in downtown St. George, the main building of the Seven Wives Inn -- a gray and white Victorian with spacious porches and verandas -- overlooks the Brigham Young Winter Home.

The inn's name commemorates its history as a hiding place for fugitive polygamists, one of whom did, in fact, have seven wives.

Plural marriage, a storied and controversial part of early Mormonism, was outlawed by the church in 1890 to fortify Utah's bid for statehood. The practice nevertheless continued intermittently for decades. Today, it is confined to a few fundamentalist sects.

About two hours northeast of Las Vegas, St. George is still called Utah's Dixie, a name derived from the mission of the first Mormon settlers: planting cotton during the Civil War. Under the leadership of Erastus Snow, 309 families went there in 1861 and harvested 100,000 pounds of cotton in their first year.

Young, attracted by the mild winters, bought a home there in 1871 and added characteristic New England touches, including a wraparound porch and veranda. Meticulously restored, the house is painted green and rust and surrounded by a white picket fence.

The scion of a Vermont farm family, Young excelled at carpentry, painting, cabinetmaking and blacksmithing. Original furnishings and artifacts show off his refined taste, his woodworking skills and the peculiar Mormon craft of painting native pine to simulate other materials.

In his garden, Young grew grapes for wine that was sold to non-Mormons passing through. Although he practiced plural marriage (he had more than two dozen wives and 57 children), Young is said to have shared this home with only one wife, Amelia, whose portrait adorns the wall.

"Why Amelia?" I ask. "Because she was younger," says Sister Rhea Johnson, my guide, "and she had no children," making the home a quiet retreat.

Young first went to St. George to oversee construction of the tabernacle. Completed in 1876, it resembles a New England Georgian red-brick church with a white spire. But the "bricks" are of red sandstone from the cliffs embracing the city: another Mormon trompe l'oeil. Inside the tabernacle, plaster decorative motifs representing cotton and grapes pay tribute to agriculture.

The architect -- Miles Romney, a great-grandfather of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney -- designed two free-standing circular staircases leading to the balcony. Young, however, decided that the balcony was too high for worshippers to see the pulpit.

Proud of his craftsmanship, Romney refused to tamper with the staircases. So Young had the entire balcony lowered, and worshippers, after climbing the staircases, descend eight steps to reach the balcony pews.

Non-Mormons are barred from entering temples. But in the visitor center of the St. George Tabernacle, a crenelated white fortress topped by a white tower, church elder Boyd Cook describes some of what takes place there, including the exchange of covenants with God and the "sealing" of couples and families together for eternity.

A few miles away in Santa Clara is the Jacob Hamblin Home, built of red sandstone and ponderosa pine in the frontier style. It seems generations removed from Young's house, though the two men were contemporaries.

Hamblin (1819-86) had 24 children and four wives in all, but never more than two at a time. Their bedrooms, on the ground floor, are mirror images of each other -- an indication that Hamblin did not play favorites. The wives tended Hamblin's large family while he was on the road, making peace and preaching the Mormon gospel to Indians.

College town

A bastion of Mormonism with a solid academic reputation, Brigham Young University sits at the base of the Wasatch Mountains.

The Provo campus, with more than 30,000 students, boasts spectacular views and an immaculate modern look, as though it has been scrubbed clean. Students subscribe to an honor code that includes a ban on premarital sex, alcohol and tobacco.

The Joseph F. Smith Building (named for a nephew of the first prophet who became a prophet himself) has Renaissance touches, including a piazza. The law school, built in the 1970s, pays homage to art deco, with a facade marked by strong vertical elements.

After a night at the Hines Mansion Bed & Breakfast, I drive through the well-preserved downtown, anchored by the tabernacle.

A Utah Valley Symphony concert has just ended, and elementary-school kids tumble out of the building with shrieks of joy. The tabernacle's Victorian revival facade, with its gently sloping towers, evokes a grand Gilded Age mansion -- a confident assertion of prosperity and dominion.

By contrast, the Provo Utah Temple, on a hill overlooking the Utah Valley, is a circular, ribbed white stone structure capped by a thin white spire that might be mistaken for a spaceship. I skip a close encounter and head north.

Temple Square

At the heart of Salt Lake City -- and Mormonism itself -- is Temple Square, a 35-acre complex that aptly reflects the faith's worldly success and global reach. Regular tours by missionaries focus more on proselytizing than architectural detail, but plaques, two visitor centers, and the engaging Museum of Church History and Art help fill the informational gaps.

Dominating Temple Square is the granite temple with six spires whose design is said to have appeared to Young in a vision. Workers needed four days to haul a single granite block by oxen and rail from Little Cottonwood Canyon -- one reason the temple took a biblical 40 years to build. Young, dubbed the "American Moses," died before its completion in 1893.

Opposite the temple is the recently restored Salt Lake Tabernacle, with pin-drop acoustics and a domed roof, like a tortoise shell, that is still considered an engineering marvel.

Its curved wooden roof trusses, held together by wooden pegs, have been reinforced with steel. Its pine pews, with their painted graining, have been replaced with real oak.

I listen to Richard L. Elliott's afternoon demonstration of the tabernacle's magnificent 11,623-pipe organ, and on Sunday morning return to hear the celebrated Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing a mix of patriotic and religious hymns. The pioneers dragged their instruments across the plains, and music remains integral to Mormon culture.

Along S. Temple Street are the Assembly Hall, an old church meetinghouse; the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, whose ornate columns and cornices are reminders of its past life as an opulent hotel; and the 1854 Beehive House, whose beehive motif symbolizes the Mormon work ethic.

Young lived here with his wife Lucy and their seven children and used it as his official residence. Dozens of his other wives and children lived next door in the Lion House, which had 20 bedrooms on its upper floor alone.

The Lion House dining room, which seated 70, is now a cafeteria serving excellent home-style cuisine.

My last stop of the day is the Conference Center, completed in 2000 to house the twice-yearly Latter-day Saints general conference. Even empty, its 21,000-seat indoor amphitheater is impressive. The hallways contain dozens of artworks, including images of The Book of Mormon, the prophets and the journey west.

The building's south facade, facing the temple and clad in granite from the same quarry, resembles a Maya temple, with stepped terraces, gardens and fountains -- a verdant contrast to the desert fort where my trip began.

At dusk, the perfect hour, elder Jim Smith leads a rooftop tour. We watch the setting sun crease the temple, the downtown and the entire Salt Lake Valley with gentle shafts of pink and gold.

By then, the temple is illuminated, its towers iridescent like pearl -- a glorious emblem of spiritual and earthly zeal.